Compound Interest

Amongst the oilcan bursting sounds of exploding transformers popping cool blue arcs against the dust-filled horizon, we were also startled by a domino thuds at about 4am.  These images suggest the fierce power of compound interest, as the fence's inferior design allowed tiny insects to slowly chew through anything meaningfully structural.

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Kubrick's sterile humanity

Impressionistically reviewing his work, I hypothesize Kubrick preferred solutions borne of intellectual externalities, functioning on deeds which champion anthro-conquest, our doctrine of conquering nature. In 2001, that thesis is strongly bracketed; the savage weaponized femur turns to elegant spaceship, then alien superbeings thoughtfully gift a new improved human edition, the Star Child, as if questing the greatest externality--the infinite womb of space--will bring us blessings, improvement. Oh how far we've come!

Yet what we may need delivered instead, as Derrick Jensen suggests, is a Stone Age being, a relatively ambition-less "primitive" who consciously curtails violent growth so as to not accelerate world destruction.

If the gift is not a future science-fictiony offering from aliens and superbeings, then perhaps the blessing is something we already have: memory, the cushion of our soul. After all, the cultural act of forgetting is a kind of ignorance, a scourge of civilization failing to learn from itself.

Kubrick was fond of spoofing & juxtaposing cultural schizophrenias; a computer programed with human contradictions to kill those he's meant to protect, the manic ironies of war, civilization as a veneer for savagery, etc. I don't do justice summarizing his critiques of our world.

Here, we mischaracterize our humble beginnings, restyle nature to our own liking, disconnected as products of glorious Cartesian separations.

Cogito Ergo Sum, Kubrick?

Avatar 3d

Avatar 3d, a real case study where extra visual dimensionality leeches from narrative depth, where imaginative visuals decouple from substance. Worth seeing for it's intense psychedelic jelly-fish design alone, beyond that, a high fructose corn syrup jewel, rife with a Hollywood cookie-cutter Noble Savage approach to native culture. After the visual insulin jolt, a mean limbic bottom awaits where one feels empty, cheated..and the cruel twist is that we'll suffer the formulaic polarizations of Cameron to witness the beautiful design.

Yes, I thought we were done with the 18th century Noble Savage approach, but Hollywood has been running on cultural fumes for years. Salient to that dated concept, is that through exposure to the pure natives, white man regains his mojo and outdoes the natives at their own game. But what's most troubling about Avatar's depictions, is not the white Messiah perspective mainstream Hollywood feels compelled to frame narrative, but the lack of awareness on how the leveraged wholesale homogenizing of cultures driven to extinction is constantly trotted onstage by same cudgel-like ethnocentrism.

We like easy targets, and there's plenty of "The Other," they make nice pawnish paper tigers, they're easy to colonize with our ideologies--narrative or political. For Avatar, the native reference is a mishmash of fragile shamanistic mystery, nothing to differentiate, grounded in sledgehammer Disney-esque poles of them vs. us. The most irony for the loss of the unique character of Native American civilization is blabbed in the trite words of the director who says that his film "asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world."

If Avatar is a consciousness raising device to this end, we are all doomed in a cycle of revenge and black and white thought.

Allegorical science fiction? Yes, but we want to be entertained at the expense of conscience, so history can wait outside the theater until we're done with our cultural fix.

Oil as Oil

Consider a candle; a wick and fat. A simple invention that burns concentrated energy stores, once animal fats, to provide the revolutionary translation of light. The insatiable desire to consume scarce energies and fats for which our evolution has attuned us, also translates into the macrosmal need for civilization to consume the earth's fats, it's oil, in the name of expansion, satisfaction. American led consumption and materialism, the hallmarks of our culture, declares us a fast food civilizaton, low on nutrients, high in fat, rendering immediate satisfactions prone to cultural opportunism that checks our famed freedom.

So goes the simple grace of a candle under the metaphor of quite possibly the most significant evolutionary event for homo sapiens since the advent of consciousness.

Our survival hangs in the balance as statesmen beholden to the tenants of materialism bid on the highest ground. We have the Rainbow, but not enough cheap lumber to purchase on debt to build an ark. The Rainbow may've been more a promissory bridge to an afterlife, if you believe that kind of thing.

Taking of Pelham 123:

Why is Tony Scott allowed to make films? To churn lengthy commercials which incite us with manipulation to buy aspirin for a headache we don't have? Seems so. He's somehow strayed into feature films, vomiting camera moves across screen, furrowing his brow under no doubt a tiresome baseball cap while pointing meaningfully to meaningless overdone cinematic constructions. His nauseating roundy-round camera moves feel like the Hallmark© Card of suspense films. Especially when their jutted against flashy blunt instrument titles, punctuated with freeze frames, and then if you didn't get the BIG IMPORTANCE, layered with accompanying dramatic sound flourishes. His machinations reek of a hollow mind thrashing in Inferno, grasping at slippery reeds, trying to macho his Soul onto a Platform seconds before Real Wisdom sees through his snake oil cinematic crap, flushing him to a hell of hackneyed Form without Content. Walter Gropius and Abel Gance sit on mushrooms burping methane gas which he must inhale...Oh if it were only true. 21st century scientist theorize his brain must be made of styrofoam, issuing a burning toxic gas of sound and fury signifying nothing.

This film was an complete embarrassment to watch. A stylistic slap in the face, the film was the perfect candidate for the ADD Award, chock full of music videoesque unmotivated camera moves and shaky-cam, set on paper thin characters. Tony Scott wastes any subtlety possible in fine performers like Denzel Washington by larding the screen with whooshy action flourishes, transparently designed to poke anxiety into one's lymbic system, but instead just chaff the eyes like the hot air it is. I think the sympathetic tear I shed for Washington's character was accidental, meant for my own grief at the sorry state of filmmaking.

All of the suspense was made predicable by Scott's iron skillet over-the-head approach to action, deflates believability, rendering it a total farce. One cop car after another flying off overpasses may've been to impeach NYC policing, yet it backfires as a cheap cinematic gruel slopping out of the tawdry bag of hackneyed tricks Scott carries no doubt from commercial days at RSA.

Give up Tony Scott, your work is insulting, pitiful, empty and full of the excess of narcissist reigns on the canvas; you spoil your subject with crass impatience, ruining even the best of talents with nothing more than smoke and shaking mirrors. The money you make to ferry yourself in your luxury car, hang your hat in your overpriced unhumble home is borrowed on the minds of shanghai'ed viewers. Return it and we may forgive you for your abominal stylings you deem cleverly released into the public culture.

Hopefully someone will rope you back to the small screen to contain your hubris, which after viewing Pelham, works only on the lymbic system, hiding in full cowardice to venture further into any meaningful communication with the human psyche. You have the subtlety of a piano falling at 1000 feet, the horror of a refined instrument with only a few keys able to convey beauty in the right hands put into service as a crude gravitational fall, it's refined qualities reduced to sheer mass.

Tony Scott, stop, go back to roots.

Prenatal Carnations

Previous to 44 years ago, in 1927 I was a light filament being replaced on a streetlamp in Prague. One of the first to burn crooked thus melting the globe in a deformed shape which pointed down like a misshapen half-schnitzel, and to Jungians visiting from the clinic in Switzerland, a clear manifestation of the Vajra. Some of the lower elite, bored with their estate, were offended, and nightmares ensued. The globe was hastily removed and one apprentice Strausslempwerker was dismissed by his overweight supervisor in a crass show of power to attract the young baker's daughter who watched as the workmen finished their repairs. She was reputedly adopted, her mother disappeared after a boating accident, taken for dead, but her body never found. She had the habit of spitting into the street, a sort of a mating call to the supervisor. There were many other events I witnessed, one thought comes to mind frequently. Rilke made trip to an obscure publisher across the avenue. It was overheard by a bakery customer that he'd visited the city in search of a specific volume on alchemy. He stood outside across the street underneath the lamp, and stared at the shop for some time before entering. A few weeks later, the building caught afire mysteriously. It was rumored a woman from a Gypsy circus who reputedly could spontaneously ignite her arms and legs would also stop and stare each year until Rilke's death.

The Second Lobster

After a while, there’s very little gone invented in this carbohydrate conscious, accident prone and asleep by 10 world. There’s a good explanation for this. We’ve witnessed the new phenonenon of the rising transnational, sugar-substitute corporation Mortal Hijinks Limited, a professional firm that manufactures everything from your shiny toaster to the splinter you can get on their semi-disposable Swedish glue soaked particleboard modular shelf units. More noticeable is the semantic shift of shortened, hypenated, more time-efficient words on billboards, LCD screens, computers, and now holograms paved into walls and roads. These are things that won’t happen, though, as Dr. Fromelius and his mental associate Kimberly Gnashingworth unwittingly prevent these manifestations during a long overdue discussion at their modest Cleveland apartment one autumn evening.

It starts with the lobster. Fromelius insists--over piles of newsclippings, half-eaten ham fromage sandwiches, and an old typewriter—that even though he lost the book at the metro, the main character ‘Bunelian’ was having an interior dialog to schedule his day around getting a lobster home.

“No, no, it was Belacqua. Belacqua.” Kimberly insisted. She was tired of these meanderings; how many times had she endured this supplicant’s rant. Bogged, neither moving back nor forth, yes, this was his condition! First, you grab ahold of his bowtie, knee gently in the back so he thinks it’s the first step in an erotic overture, lean back quickly and… Nevermind. Kimber pulls back the curtains to peer down to the dull yellow light cast on the street’s wet sheen: a knobby manhole cover. She notices the threadiness of the Danish modern couch’s arm. It occurs to her she once cleaned it of dog vomit after a ill-fated party with her psychology friends and his garage-bound, pipe-dream inventors. Never again!

“So particular, it is unimportant their designation. Besides, besides, young lady, you can go back to it again and again. A kernel of truth shines out each time, each time! Anyway, the genius of it is that he was charting the day, just like you or I do, and..”

“You know you sound like a Mamet stooge each time you get excited. I mean, look at you!”

Fromelius is nodding like Groucho now, and had he more ambularity he’d leap the furniture and be wearing her like a priest wears a jacket on a cold day, or something like that, he thought. Besides, this was no time for exceptionally accurate metaphors to support his anger. Indeed, he was feeling a ripple of insight, maybe a small, unallowed epiphanic tick on the universal clock…yes, a very tiny nudge. The problem at hand was how to organize it..but now, now this, this this is different. The solution was, he thought, to invent a practical system of using microwaves to deliver clear images over long distances to illuminate on a small collection rectangle in a reciever’s home. If only he could summon Mr. Alexander at the University, but it was too late that evening, and Alexander never could use the telephone too well after the electrical storm in ’38. Damn General Electric should ground those things!

“You alive over there?” Kimber jabbed.

“I’d never had a more ungrateful associate in my entire career.” Fromelius spoke to his sketch pad which he began sketching out formulas.

“The sandwiches are good, aren’t they? I’m not just a pretty face here, you know, I can sing and dance and publish these things for you, and above all,” Kimber stands, emphasizing by tugging her Japanese tunic straight, “you’d slip quickly into a quagmire, a big churning, hot amphitheater of delusion and self-involved, self-created, slap-happy, gibberish if you did not have me to..to anchor your rudderless dreadnought of machinations, lest they careen headlong into untempered glass buildings of the Chystler building!”

He enjoyed that one immensely. In the course of her oath-style swearings he turned in his overpadded chair with a wry grin, as he knew that the fire had not gone out in her, a burning for Shakespeare, and that what would follow was a four course meal with a roasted duck to lay her apology on a set of fine plates. “Are you feeling a bit peckish?” he hinted, thinking a good jump on the Peking marinade was not unwise.

“I’m not done with you, Pickle! Nine years. Nine years! You know why that number is significant? Huh?”

“Well, my little jellyfish, no, I—“ Fromelius was now very worried; something had really sprouted in her. From his sedentary repose, her thin figure seemed to grow as she moved toward him, only made taller by the severe lines on her silken, form fitting shirt.

“Well, I don’t either and that’s the trouble. I mean, in all that time, what has this done, this collecting and piling and decoding bits of things here, a Frankenstein brain in a jar of formaldehyde, windmills, solar panels, holograms? Can’t you see what I’m getting at here? It’s not all this stuff,” Kimber tosses up a stack of well manicured articles, yellowed by the ocassional blast of sun near the window of dead orchid plants. Fromelius grasps at them as they cascade down toward the floor. One paper is cast up and settles on a blade of the ceiling fan Kimber had installed last summer. “It’s not about this all. It’s about you and I, see?” Kimber leaned against the heavy desk; a half-eaten sandwich fell and glued itself smack down on the old floor. “I’m not cut out for this stuff. I’m better behind stage, laying out the plots, dreaming up scenery…not these imaginary machines. I just can’t do it.”

Fromelius took a deep breath and looked into his lap. Another sandwich lay there, the mayonaise causing the ham slice to inch across his brown couderoy slacks. A mental note: plastic-based fabric sealant.

Kimber raises Fromelius’ chin, and shakes her head slowly. “You’re thinking about how to fix that now, aren’t you.”

“No, no, how could…That’s absurd, my nutcake, I’m all ears to you now.”

“Oh, it’s alright.” Kimber grabs a file box of magazines and deliberately walks to the window. “It’s in your nature. I know you. I mean, WHO am I kidding.” She pauses to meet his eyes, which fill with anticipation like a dog sleeps in the morning sun, she thinks, still upset. Kimber gently and knowingly nods to him as she narrows her eyes, sliding the window up, a patter of rain and the must of the Everberry Cornelius Rye Shrub wafting in. Sixteen years later, its name is reduced to the “Jimbo” bush.

“You are not being rhetorical, are you?” Fromelius rumples his freckled, Scottish brow.

“Yes and no.”

“Okay, ah..” he frowns.

“Answer the question, then,” Kimber insists.

“Which one?”

“What do you mean which one?” She leans a bit away from the window, a logistical fact not lost on Fromelius.

“Huh?” he stalls for time.

“There is only one question I want you to answer, Dr. Pancake Brain!”

“No need to get nasty..no need.” Fromelius knows when blood pressure rises, muscles turn slightly acidic, so her physical fit will be diminished more quickly, no one on the ground level will suffer a 50 pound box upon them. I’m very kind, he thought to himself. The truth of the matter was he had all the research for his “television” idea. He would show them at the Carnegie Labs, he would turn them on their blue-blood noses. Now, the little matter of the angry associate was first, then the duck meal, yes. That is how it would go.

“Listen, you aqualine smoking jacket! I don’t want to get wrapped up in theoretics, in your warped Cartesian mind, if such a noodle exists. Well, sure it does, and it has to be fed by a estranged Freudian! You..you.. How ‘bout that now, this is a fine evening when I can get two damned and dead men in a sentence, two men whose ruinous ideas serve us by faster railroads and talking cures! This means you, Fromy, that’s what I’m getting at.” She was nearly out of breath. The box teetered on the window ledge, as she nudged it on the sill with spastic gyrations of her diatribe.

“Now,” she calmed, smothing her olive-oil hair back so the part lined up again with her jacket fold. “You will answer THE question of WHO.”

“Are you finished? May I even mount a chance?” Kimber clenches her jaw to prevent this sentence from escaping: “You have five seconds to say something to rescue your box of worthy toil, you muskrat of Saskechewan, you worm of Taiwan, you plankton of the Sahara!”

“I see what you’re doing. Just because I am pinned to a stool doesn’t mean the subtle emotion is failed on me. ‘Who’ is obviously ‘you.’ And this is because, you want me to see that you want to go back to the theater, and that’s fine. Now, for the number nine, that’s easy. It corresponds to not only your years, but the number of levels of hell, and this is your unconscious production, the barnacle on the boat as you sail about, so to speak, that you can’t scratch, but nonetheless, the itch persists. This is why for you the short bursts, the monologues, as we’ll call them, I am the recipient of, as, in your field, or rather, your previous field of the possibility of Self and Mind, you direct unfulfilled desires at a object trustworthy enough to contain, um, these vollies, which I see are—“

Kimber slumps, her eyes turned slightly upward, the hydrogren leaving her dirgible. Could this be true? Time froze for a moment, much like when it will when Fromelius will invent the M-Whiff, a space/time folding machine in box # 27 which is rotting in his leaky garage, albeit in a possible future garage too. A speck of iron dust the always neat and tidy postman brought in on an airmail letter from Fromelius’ ex-wife hovered at exact equidistance between the arguing pair. Kimber was about to let a heavy exhale, swirreling the particle towards her partner’s nostril, which would have cause him to sneeze, bits of snot to adhere over the root-modifier in a series of complex equations, and in effect turn Fromelius’ “microwave oven” idea into a destructive, planet-killing death ray. Luckily, she her breath was still contained, fermenting into oxides, as her hazel eyes caught the edge of the errant paper on the “ceiling propeller,” as Fromelius called it. So fixed was her gaze—the memory of the argument dissipated slightly, enough for the doctor to lean to his good side, and the mayonaise side of the ham to flip onto the floor, and for her to reach up toward the fan switch chain, the box loosening from her grip, as the neighbor—Senora Coldflaugh—slams her door, jarring Kimber slightly off balance, which she regains by footing atop the pigslice, slipping right, as Fromelius reaches out to catch her in an uncharacteristically agile move, but cannot unseat quickly enough, the box handle tears, and the crate of intricate plans yielding unbelievable prosperity headed full clip towards Senora Coldflaugh’s 25 cent Macy’s persimmon and mulberry leaf chapeau.

It was a cold night in Cleveland, an an unseasonably warm Canadian wind ushered it’s way across the northfacing brick apartment building. Senora Coldfaugh’s husband Morty Flipstein had passed on years earlier, and she was disposed to wander the lake, flicking corn at nocturnal snakes the early French traded in colonial times. “Mudpie! Flakebill!” She would shout to them, names people attributed in her country only to secret lovers. Nonetheless, the plump Senora would not see her sleepless reptilians, as Fromelius and Kimber’s differences had a preceeding rendevous with destiny.

Kimber woke on the couch, a flaky and very cold trout draped over her eye. A slivered almond fell from the fish.

“Didn’t have any meat, my darling.” Fromelius rolled over on his office chair, sunlight streaming behind him.

“Coffee on the larch,” she moaned.

“Pardon me?”

“A dream..a bad bad dream.”

Fromelius was already onto the next thing. “I have an idea for a network of calculating machines. I call it ‘the internet.’”

© 2009 David Alexander Davidson